As Halloween Month continues, here’s a look at my favorite Jean Rollin vampire films. Note that these are not my all-time favorite movies about vampires, just my favorites by Rollin.
This French director is known as a “love him or hate him” kind of creator and in my opinion his works range from brilliant to So Bad They’re Good. In the past Balladeer’s Blog has examined Jean’s zombie films like The Living Dead Girl and Pesticide, his “vampires as a mutant species” flick The Nude Vampire and his oddly modern horror work Night of the Hunted.
Toss in his eerie, haunting and beautiful movie The Iron Rose and I’ve covered most of the Jean Rollin films that I consider to be on the good to brilliant side of the ledger. I avoided reviewing his vampire movies (outside of the quasi-science fiction piece The Nude Vampire) because they are virtually their own separate subgenre and I wanted to feature my favorites in one post.
THE SHIVER OF THE VAMPIRES (1970) – In my view this is the first real example of a Rollin vampire film. His Rape of the Vampire definitely showed how inexperienced he was at horror, while The Nude Vampire had those undertones of sci-fi that I mentioned above.
This film is labeled everything from arthouse to grindhouse but I consider it to be more on the arthouse side. Think of a combination of Federico Fellini & David Lynch crossed with Hammer’s erotic vampire movies. It’s definitely Adults Only but more for tone and eroticism than gore and violence.
Isle (Sandra Julien) and Antoine (Jean-Marie Durand) are newlyweds who have just left their wedding reception and stop off to visit two of Isle’s male cousins in their very old castle by the sea. Two beautiful, enigmatic ladies greet them at the castle and introduce themselves as the maids. Continue reading
THE DEATHMASTER (1972) – In between his pair of movies as the vampire named Count Yorga the one and only Robert Quarry starred as a vampiric Charles Manson wannabe in this film. The Deathmaster starts out with a great bit that wouldn’t look out of place in a Jean Rollin horror flick from France: the huge, hulking Barbado (Le Sesne Hilton) plays eerie flute music, seemingly luring ashore a sea-tossed coffin. Naturally this casket holds our “Deathmaster” – a vampire called Khorda. 
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